We’ve just finished the next alpha-release of our 5.1 version. It has become a bit more stable, we’ve cleaned up the source code, added fixes for building on distros other than Ubuntu and we’ve brushed up our packaging mechanism for Ubuntu – so we can now offer a Repository for use with apt (either on command-line or via Synaptics). There’s only one package – google’s cTemplates – that you’ll still have to install manually before handing the work over to apt to fetch and install workbench on your Ubuntu system.

So first head over to google’s cTemplate-Pages to get libctemplate0. It’s best to fetch the latest .deb package, which you can then install with one simple command like this:

sudo dpkg -i libctemplate0_0.91-1_i386.deb

The next step is to add our Repos to your apt-sources. Do this by adding following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/ubuntu/ binary/
deb-src ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/ubuntu/ source/

Alternatively launch Synaptics (System->Administration->Synaptics Package Manager) and select Settings->Repositories, switch to the second tab-page named Third-Party Software, click [Add] and enterthe two lines above (you’ll have to addthe first line, click [Add Source] and hit [Add] again for the second line)

Now tell apt to update its repo-information. Hit the [Reload] button in Synaptics or when on cmd-line type:

sudo apt-get update

Finally tell apt to install MySQL Workbench 5.1 alpha by either locating the Package (Filed in section ‘Utilities’) and selecting it for installation or type following command at your shell prompt:

sudo apt-get install mysql-workbench

Following the steps above should result in a runable Workbench-Application on your Ubuntu-box. Note that we currently only offer i386 packages, if you need a package for some other architecture, please build it from sources. For all non-Ubuntu-users who are willing to try building workbench on their systems we have uploaded a source tarball to the following location:

ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/mysql-workbench-5.1.3-alpha.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/mysql-workbench-5.1.3-alpha.tar.gz.md5

Please keep on posting/writing, we very much appreciate your input on fixes for building on other distros and your opinions and experiences. Theres another release coming this week – the next release of our GA version 5.0, so stay tuned